SHENZHEN I/O
You move to Shenzhen, take a job building circuits, and read a manual you're expected to print out — and the most-upvoted negative review, at 905 votes, recommends it anyway.
8 / 10
The Wanderer reading room
Game Reviews
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
Browse the reviews
Sid Meier's Civilization VI
The definitive modern Civilization for most players, thanks to two expansions that meaningfully deepened its district-and-diplomacy foundation — carrying an old, now-dated controversy over a data-collection policy update, and a genre-standard but real DLC bill for anyone chasing the complete roster.
8 / 10
SIGNALIS
A retro survival horror game that wears its Resident Evil and Silent Hill influences openly and still manages real originality — beloved for its atmosphere, queer storytelling and puzzle design, with one honest recurring complaint about how tedious that puzzle design gets.
8.5 / 10
Slice & Dice
A minimalist dice-based roguelike tactics game, originally built on itch.io, that's earned near-unanimous acclaim on Steam — with an unusually small negative-review pool centred on pacing and content depth rather than any fundamental design flaw.
8.5 / 10
Slime Rancher
One of the most-loved games on Steam at 98% across 155,976 reviews — and the two loudest criticisms on its store page are complaints about an Early Access build it left behind nine years ago.
8 / 10
SnowRunner
A relentlessly demanding, meditative off-road trucking sim that reviewers describe with genuine reverence and dark humor in equal measure — undercut for years by unreliable multiplayer and crossplay stability, and an extensive DLC roster reviewers say pushes toward $200 for the full experience.
7 / 10
SOMA
A philosophical sci-fi horror game about consciousness, identity and what survives an underwater apocalypse — nine years on, still Overwhelmingly Positive, and still honestly criticized by a consistent minority for gameplay that some feel gets in the story's way.
9 / 10
Songs of Conquest
The best-looking Heroes of Might and Magic successor anyone has made, still getting factions and campaigns four years on — with an enemy AI its own players have been complaining about that entire time.
7.5 / 10
Sons Of The Forest
Endnight's sequel to The Forest is the best-looking survival-horror island you can build a base on, and its rockiest reviews — mostly written in the first weeks after launch — argued a beautiful map was hiding surprisingly little to actually do. Recent sentiment suggests the gap between the two has narrowed since.
7.5 / 10
SpaceChem
The game that started a genre, fifteen years old, and the lowest-rated of the seven engineering puzzlers in this library — which turns out to say more about being first than about being worst.
8 / 10
Space Rock Breaker
A NZ$4.79 incremental about shooting asteroids and dropping the ore into a Plinko machine. Its achievement curve is the flattest this library has measured — almost everyone who buys it finishes it — and its prestige system is the one part that doesn't work.
7 / 10
Steel Judgment
A five-day-old Early Access boomer-shooter roguelite from a solo developer, blending Ultrakill-style movement combat with Risk of Rain-style item stacking and a boss roster drawn from world mythology — an unusually strong Early Access opening, read here as exactly that rather than a finished verdict.
7.5 / 10
Stellaris
A decade-old 4X space strategy game beloved enough to produce reviewers with 2,000+ hours logged — and, since 2024, a wave of those exact same veteran players turning against Paradox over DLC pricing, a specific performance regression, and player-reported AI-generated content.
7 / 10
Stray
Four years on, 97.2% positive across 176,389 reviews — and its critics are still arguing that the only reason it scores that well is that you play as a cat.
8.5 / 10
Streetlight Syndicate
A Prohibition-era mafia idle/incremental with 5,000-plus words of dialogue, ten narrative ascensions and multiple endings — well liked by most of its early players, with a save-wiping bug at the finish line that the developer appears to have patched days after two reviewers independently reported it.
7 / 10
Tap Ninja - Idle game
A free incremental with one reviewer clocking 31,732 hours and a persistent complaint from the rest — that a game with "idle" in its title keeps asking you to click.
7 / 10
TCG Card Shop Simulator
A card-shop management game that nails ten hours better than almost anything — and whose most-visible criticism, AI-generated art, turns out to have been answered in 2024 and has since vanished from its reviews.
7 / 10
Team Fortress 2
In 2024 its players review-bombed it out of love, demanding Valve fix the bots. Two years on, negative reviews have collapsed to a handful a year and 94 of the last 100 are positive. The campaign worked.
8.5 / 10
TEKKEN 8
An outstanding fighting game that added a cash shop and premium battle pass two months after launch, then spent a year buffing offence until its own 300-hour veterans stopped recognising it — and is only now climbing back.
7 / 10
The Age of Decadence
The cult-classic CRPG built on a genuinely radical idea — that ending up in combat means your character build or your dialogue choices already failed — and a decade later, still the purest expression of a philosophy most of its own genre never dared attempt.
7 / 10
THE DEEPEST CASTLE
A first-person melee roguelike built on a custom, hand-written CPU software renderer by a solo developer with a small but devoted following — several of whom address him by name in their reviews and are already asking what he builds next.
7 / 10
theHunter: Call of the Wild
Nine years, 60 DLC packs and 201,251 reviews — and unlike other DLC-heavy giants, here the store really is the complaint, because what's behind the paywall isn't extra content but the equipment you need.
7 / 10
THE LONGING
A game whose central mechanic is a 400-day countdown that runs whether you play or not — the most literal treatment of idle time anyone has attempted, and it's 92.3% positive six years on.
8 / 10
The Outlast Trials
A genuinely frightening co-op horror game that's 93.9% positive — and whose most invested players, with sixty-hour averages, are now leaving negative reviews over the studio's use of AI-generated art.
7.5 / 10